Trading cards earned by playing games generate goodies for Steam users.

Steam will release a new beta feature within its service called Steam Trading Cards according to an announcement from the company. The trading cards integrate with a handful of Valve titles at launch, and players that collect the cards will be able to use them to earn coupons as well as profile backgrounds and other items to augment their Steam experience.

The launch titles that will generate trading cards to collect include Don't Starve, Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Team Fortress 2, Portal 2 and Half-Life 2. When players get a particular set of cards they can craft them into a game badge to get “marketable items” like emoticons, profile backgrounds, and coupons for things like game discounts or DLC. The badges can then be upgraded, or “leveled up,” by collecting the same set again.

The info page states that half of any card set is dropped during game play while the other half is “earned through collecting prowess.” Badges contribute to a player’s “Steam Level,” and as that number rises players get account-bound items including extra friend list slots.

Interested parties can join the beta now via the Steam Trading Cards Group. Valve states that the trading card feature will slowly roll out to other titles over the coming months.

"Hello little mouse. Today, to get your fix, you have to press all the buttons and we'll give you badges for it!" - Mr. Steam Skinner Box

Dear boy, what did you think video games are?

3590 posts | registered May 15, 2008

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

Play our games and get arbitrary free rewards to get more of our free service.

Yeah, that really sounds like EA.

To be clear, I'm not complaining about free rewards and free service etc. But "Doesn't cost money" is not the same as "free".

If I want to have 300 friends, the "cost" is that I need to link my account to Facebook. If I want 301 friends, the "cost" is whatever amount of time I need to invest to earn the Friend List Upgrade. So it's not free, it has a cost, the cost is just Not Money.

Also, all the other stuff you can earn costs Valve money to produce - someone has to make it. But my friends list? That's just a collection of rows in a database table. If we are really generous and say that each row takes a whole kilobyte of space ... would that extra kB cost Valve even one cent per year? Even if I have 1024 more friends, now we're up to a whole megabyte of extra space for my friends list ... would that even cost them one cent per year?

Also also: Valve receives value from my friends list. Their advertisements are informed by the list of games which my friends have purchased, and vice versa.

So, in summary: Valve is forcing a cost (my time) upon my acquisition of a resource (the length of my friends list) which costs them almost nothing (hard drive space is cheap) and which they benefit from giving to me. (through more targeted advertising)

I maintain that this is BS. Also, it strikes me as uncharacteristic of Valve. I'll grant, the EA comparison may be over-the-top. Still ...

I've been expecting Valve to add some kind of "gamerscore" to Steam for quite some time now. I'd thought it would have been tied to achievements though.

I understand why they're doing it (people tend to spend time on things like this), but I can't say that I'm a fan. Sure, I know that you don't *have to* use it, but personally I would have preferred if it wasn't there at all. I'm sure that lots of people will like it though, and presumably that outweighs my slight distaste.

.Nice. So getting achievements isn't just for people with too much time on their hands and / or wanting a bigger e-peen and may now be worth doing.

False. Cheevos are still for losers. You can probably make more money in the time spent *not* doing that shit than you'll save with these coupons.

Except playing games is something people do when they're not working and making money. I could get a second job or do something like that and trade all of my leisure time for money instead of playing games and/or doing other non-work stuff, but I much prefer playing games. Getting some reward out of something I'd be doing anyways is much better than doing something I don't want to do in order to make money.

That's not as much of an issue to me- I've bought a ton of games that I've never even played, and I have no problems spending money on new games, especially if I want to support the developer or send a message that the industry should invest more money in that type of game (i.e. 4x and TBS games) by doing my bit to bolster the sales numbers for that type of game. However, I like that I can get rewarded for things that I'm already doing- I don't think there's really going to be that many people grinding achievements in a game they don't enjoy in order to get a $5 off coupon, but getting $5 off a new game because I did another playthrough of a game I enjoy is being rewarded for something I was likely to do anyways.

This reeks of "gamification" to me and I want none of it. Why would Valve of all people feel they need to manipulate people into playing more games? Why would they lock user profile customizations behind a scheme like this?